Sumana Harihareswara interviewing Eric Burns (webcomic critic), May 2005, Baycon, San Jose, California

transcribed by Mirabai Knight, stenoknight.com

You are recording, my dear little... Recording.

All the hard work.

Right. What is with that? I mean, why did you decide to have one guest blogger, and why was it her?

Largely because I liked her writing.

How did you meet her or find out about her writing?

I actually found out about her on Comixpedia. She's been on the internet forever. She actually had her own fan Usenet group before everyone on earth had their own fan Usenet group -- you know, except me.

Right.

But she's really been -- in fact, I have friends in common who knew her. But one of the first things that really got me thinking critically about webcomics, beyond the simple point of ooh, look at the funny picture of the dog, was reading an article of Wednesday's in Comixpedia, that was exploring the role of -- particularly geek girls, but of women in general in webcomics, and how they more form -- they often form idealized geek fantasies, instead of well fleshedout characters.

The Mary Sue stuff?

Yeah. Mary Sue, but also the whole Amazon stuff, the idea that yes, this is the geek girl (inaudible) thing, and yes, she is absolutely gorgeous, and loves to play all the same games we do, but is also incredibly feminine, and yet somehow submissive when the geeky male comes into the picture. You know, in other words, it ends up not being a very well formed character, and just becomes, like I said, an idealized fantasy, and not a particularly subtle one. And that really impressed me. And it actually informed one of the first essays I did on Websnark that got me some attention in the broader webcomics community, which was an examination of Jade and Miranda from PvP.

I remember. I remember that.

Yeah. Her essay actually informed part of that essay, and I made reference to it, and as a result I think she saw a trackback to it, so she started reading Websnark, and I always kept an eye out for her, and after a while, we started talking through instant messenger and stuff like that. I mean, it all comes down to: I like how she writes and I like the stuff she comes up with, and I had really reached the point where I wanted to have somebody else on, and she seemed like a logical choice. She isn't necessarily going to be the only extra person on Websnark, but she's a good one for now. As long as she wants to do it.

Right.

It seems to be -- oh, we're having an interview about Wednesday. That works. It seems to be a common thing to happen to Wednesday. I know that T Campbell, when he started the science fiction blog, as it's called, decided he couldn't do it every day anymore, and needed to have guest bloggers. She was one of the first people he asked. So she's kind of well known in circles for sticking up and -- largely because she's got a broad range of subjects she can write on, and a very engaging style, I think.

What is exciting in webcomics right now? Either a particular comic or author, or a trend?

Well, I'm kind of excited with seeing more and more people moving away from centralized models of web comic syndication. The whole thing that just came out with the blank label people, moving away from blank label, or moving away from Keenspot and forming their own -- I think what we're seeing is the next evolution in webcomic styles. In the old days -- I mean, at first it was just whoever could get any kind of hosting or a Geocities site, or whatnot. Then we had the rise of the syndicates, things like Keenspot, things like Modern Tales, all of which I think are still great, and I want the feedtofeed still, but in the last -- pretty much six months to a year and a half, we've begun to see small collectives of cartoonists, who share certain structural space, be it server space or be it shared advertising or cross connections, or whatever, but are really not forming that same kind of monolithic model like we see at Keenspot. 

Things like Day Free, which Questionable Content and White Ninja and webcomics like that are on, and things like Dumbrella, which is, of course, Goats, and Diesel Sweeties, and Wigu, and a bunch of those, and now Blank Label, which is probably, because of the way that they did it -- and the large splash they made when they left Keenspot, because it's gotten them a lot of early attention -- you really are seeing this idea of almost studiostyle, where you have an individual studio, that -- we kind of share the work with each other, but what we're really doing is just trying to promote each other's art. I think that is a good sign, because we're getting to the point where bandwidth is getting dirt cheap. And so it may not be any easier to make money doing the webcomics, but it's a lot of easier to support doing it in the first place.

The cost of your time and not necessarily (inaudible), but all the other costs that are actual monetary -- it's possible to get those really cheap or even make the tiniest beer money profit off it.

Exactly. Exactly. It's not that hard to do at this point. Because it's the example I know about at this point, I'll use Gossamer Commons --

Your comic.

My comic.

I say yours, but it's not just yours.

Right. It's mine and Greg's. And Wednesday kind of edits it. But... Wednesday and I do a lot of cross editing of each other's work at this point, just because we work well together. But Gossamer Commons has extremely inexpensive hosting, and if, in fact --

Who's your host?

I actually host through TalkAboutComics, which is some of Joey Manley's sites. he's offering a limited number of hosting slots on that, and I think it's all part of the buildup to WebcomicsNation, which is the paid for service that he's right on the edge of launching, though it's worth noting he's been right on the edge of launching it since 2003, I think. And I've actually looked at moving Websnark entirely to it, just because it's vastly cheaper than what I've got now. But the hosting cost is minimal. And even though Gossamer Commons isn't anywhere near a first tier webcomic in terms of either popularity or -- really, any measure -- very new. We're still mostly building on word of mouth. At the same time, we started with a much larger base than a webcomic normally does. And that hasn't had a negative -- you know, there hasn't been a negative bandwidth cost associated with that.

There are more and more ways to do that. And if we actually sold advertising on Gossamer Commons -- and we've chosen not to do that for at least now -- if we did it, there's no doubt that we could recoup our costs very simply. The harder point is actually finding a way to make a living doing it. To do the Scott Kurtz or Randy Milholland trick, where this could be what you do during your day. And nobody's really found a magic bullet for that -- not even Scott or Randy.

If I were a midrange cartoonist, I'm famous for 15 people, and I'm interested in the best software, the best tools, and the best hosting, or at least the best value, what would you recommend in terms of the software to automatically update your site and the host and everything else?

That is a harder question than you know. And actually, probably where WebcomicsNation's strength is going to end up being. WebcomicsNation is designed to be very turnkey and very robust. I don't know if it's going to be successful or not. We haven't actually seen the implementation of it yet. But ultimately, for someone who has a certain degree of popularity to begin with, that might be the best situation, because it's supposedly going to be designed so that they can easily set up their own advertising, set up their --

Very modular.

Right. Very modular. Very service oriented. Lots of stuff you can opt into, lots of stuff you don't have to opt into, and very much a GUI interface, here's where you upload your scripts, here's how they archive, and things like that. For pure question of cost -- and I know people who would hang me for saying this -- but you honestly can't go wrong with Keenspace. I mean, Keenspace is not particularly user friendly. I've actually done Keenspace stuff in the past, and I've kept abreast of developments in it.

This is your really old comic?

Yeah. My really old -- and I believe I really need, contractually, to put the word terrible in front of this webcomic. Keenspace's automated software is somewhat Baroque. It's --

Like rococo Baroque? Like it has curlicues?

Yeah. Frighteningly so. It was designed -- it was actually designed by Darren Bleuel, who was one of the founders of Keenspot, and the writer of the very good webcomic Nukees. And he then put out a public domain -- an open source version of it, called AutoKeen Lite, that anyone can use. And it is extremely free, and it is reliable. It's not particularly easy to learn how to use it. Once you know how to use it, it works just fine. And, like I said, the fact that it's a free site, and yes, you've got to put an ad banner at the top, but it's really not that hard a price to pay for someone who's just getting started and wants to build an audience. At the same time -- I mean, we actually looked at a number of the different automated packages. We made a decision not to go with Keenspace with Gossamer Commons -- 

You didn't want advertising, for one.

We didn't want advertising. That was really kind of key. So we actually looked at all the different pieces of automated software that were out there and used one called iStrip, which had its advantages, but also had disadvantages. For example, if I uploaded stuff in advance, it put all of those files live, so people figured out pretty quickly that they could start looking at the strips two weeks in advance and see where we were going. And, you know --

Right, by just handhacking the URL.

Exactly. And that really wasn't ideal, and there was no way to change each individual day. No matter what we named the graphic, it would rename it to a predictable element. So it just wasn't what we wanted to do. What we ultimately did, understanding that we were able to do this mostly because -- well, it goes back to Wednesday. She's extraordinarily smart. And she actually took WordPress, which is blogging software, and she managed to hack it into a shape where it could actually do a very robust implementation of daily updating, of updating in advance, and all the different things. It's extremely flexible for us. And so I really recommend that to anyone who --

You recommend that people just use blogging software?

To a degree. To a degree.

Or even her implementation of WordPress, which is open source, if I recall correctly. So they could just use Wednesday's version.

Mmhm. So it all depends on what their comfort level with the technology is. If they don't know anything about anything, WebcomicsNation is probably going to be where they want to go. And might be where they want to go anyway.

You have a tradeoff of cost, reliability, and ease of use.

Exactly.

Pick two.

Exactly. That's precisely right. And I think what will end up happening is: Over the next year or so, we're going to start seeing a lot more of these things converge. I think WebcomicsNation is going to kind of kick things into a motion -- I honestly think we'll -- I know we're beginning to see certain movements over at Keenspace, trying to bring them up to date a little bit more. It wouldn't surprise me if they started building a PHP module that would let people do a lot more stuff through a web interface, instead of literally through naming file conventions and setting up templates. And once you start seeing that, I think we're moving into an area where it's going to be even easier for anyone on earth to have a webcomic, and it's pretty darn easy right now.

It's basically as easy right now for someone to have a webcomic as it is for them to have a blog. It's just that -- well, their own ability is what keeps them back.

Exactly.

Your own ability and willingness.

Your own ability and talent.

Well, yes.

I mean, the thing -- the lesson I learned from Unfettered by Talent, which was my terrible webcomic, was that if you are in fact willing to let people look at what you're doing, no matter how bad the artwork might be, you can in fact have a webcomic. And there's really no reason not to. It's a wonderful experience to have, even if you're not very good at it. I mean, I really enjoyed being the writer/artist of that webcomic. The only reason it ended up stopping was because I had paid writing work come up that took all of my free time for a couple of months, and when I finished that up, I just didn't have the impetus to go back and get the comic strip back up.

Like any hobby.

Exactly. And that's what it was for me. But the fact -- I mean, this, to me, is an incredible gift that's been given to the world -- the idea that you can have a comic strip that potentially millions of people could read, and at the very least hundreds might, as a hobby, is wonderful.

Okay. So some relatively quick questions: About how many people do you believe -- and I understand it has to be an estimate -- about how many people do you think make their living, fulltime, from webcomics, whether as administrators or writing, inking, drawing?

As depressing as this is to say, probably less than ten.

Okay. I expected it to be that. I thought you might know of some hidden niche.

No. There is no -- unfortunately, not yet.

Like, maybe there's some department of DC or Marvel that has webcomics in some special premiumonly section of their site.

Not yet. Though it would stun me if they don't move in that direction.

Converging?

If nothing else, because it's so mindnumbingly inexpensive on DC's part. I mean, when the most expensive part of the process becomes paying the artist, that's going to be huge for DC and Marvel. And any independent you can think of. And it's going to hit them, if that's the case. That they could get into a situation where 500 or 1,000 subscribers nets them more profit than a 20,000issue run of a regular comic book.

For one thing, you don't have distribution as a problem.

Exactly. There's no --

And you don't have to deal with oh, it's adult content, so I can't sell it in this part of the store.

Right. Or in this part of the country.

Right.

And that's actually one of the other nice things about it. You get to play in a much broader market. I mean, that's true of any of the things that we're doing online. I get to have much saltier language on Websnark than I would ever get to have in a --

WAITRESS: Would you like another minute?

I'm going to check and see what I would like, actually.

I'm all set for now. Thank you. I mean, the fact that anybody can publish, that it's really dependent on the standards of what the individual publisher wants to do, rather than kind of a nebulous community standard, that's huge. This is a publishing era that has been unprecedented in the evolution of civilization on earth. And we haven't really fully begun to take advantage of that. And when we do, it's going to be kind of amazing.

You mentioned the possible emergence of sort of webcomic studios. Would these studios -- do you think they're going to end up having national leaders who influence the path that these -- sort of the style and tone and taste of each group and collective?

I think yes. And I think that's mostly because that's human nature. If you ever get a group of five or eight people, naturally one person ends up being the person who comes up with a large number of the ideas and suggestions, and other people kind of feed into it and build on it, and other people just kind of support it and are there for the ride. That's just standard group dynamics. The more that people do this kind of thing, the more we're going to see that -- and the more you'll start seeing spokesmen for individual groups come out. 

Now, the ones that we've seen so far, particularly -- the one I'm most familiar with is Dumbrella. Dumbrella is extremely egalitarian, as near as I can tell. I don't think there is any one person who is the charismatic leader of Dumbrella, per se, but at the same time, I don't think the Dumbrella cartoonists would all think of themselves as contributing the same amount or the same number of things. Obviously everyone's happy with what each other are contributing, but I think there's a qualitative difference between somebody who is showing up and putting the logo on their website and posting on forums and being supportive, and the person who's doing the design work or organizing meets and greets or things like that. 

The Trillians and the...

Exactly. Exactly. That's actually a good way of looking at it. And that's actually one of the areas where Pete Abrams, I think, has really shone. In fact, I think that's an area that Pete Abrams, with Sluggy Freelance, can inform the rest of the webcomic community, in a way that we haven't seen nearly enough of. Pete Abrams got to a point where this was his job, and he was working hard at it, but at the same time, he didn't have enough hours in the day to do everything he needed to do. So what he started doing was finding other people that could shoulder part of it. He started finding (inaudible) and Trillian and things like that. The one thing -- despite the fact that they're the only webcomic store that I know of with four employees -- four owneremployees -- the one thing that Keenspot, I think, needs to do before anything else is hire a fulltime business manager, whose entire job it is to cross the Ts and dot the Is, make decisions, make sure the right contracts go to the right people at the right time, and just really free up the natural optimism and enthusiasm of --

I'd like to order some (inaudible).

I mean, right now they have an incredibly good technical resource in the person of -- 

Kelly?

No, no, in terms of Darren Bleuel and Nate Stone, and they have an incredible amount of enthusiasm and optimism and, really, that kind of charismatic leadership we were talking about in the person of Chris Crosby, and kind of a reality check in the person of Terri Crosby, but what they don't have is a manager.

Right. And so in a business sense, the person is like the essay, when you wrote that the moment you make this a fulltime job, you need an editor -- the moment that you're making a collective sort of big and important enough, enough of an institution, it needs a manager. Just like a band, if it wants --

Exactly. And the only thing that manager has to be is the person who is going to be unpopular. You mentioned the editor, and I still absolutely believe that the second you're actually trying to put food on your table with your art, you need to have an editor who's cracking the whip over you. Well, to a certain degree, that's what a manager in a Keenspace site should be too.

There are lots of entrepreneurs who can be their own bosses.

Sure. And I don't mean to deny that, otherwise. They can't, however -- it's very hard to be your own editor. It's very hard to be the second set of eyes, looking at something, saying I don't think you've thought this through.

Okay. This is for artistic --

Yeah. For artistic types, you need to have your own editor. I mean, you just need it, once you're actually trying to make a living at it. For a business like Keenspot, you need to have a manager, and part of what they need to be doing -- 

Well, this is kind of like, I guess, how an entrepreneur who's starting a business needs a banker to look over their business plan.

Exactly. Precisely right. And that goes for everything from making certain people like Kelly and Kisai have their contracts, so that they don't disappear or stop administrating, all the way up to saying -- okay, here are 12 people in the Keenspot collective who haven't updated for seven months. Should we be talking to them? Should we be taking them off our front page? Should we be putting them in a different category? Should we be changing the way they're being compensated? And I don't necessarily have an answer to those questions, but if you have a business manager looking at that level of things, it becomes easier to work on and to be able to figure answers to those questions out.

Now, I understand that you think a person starting a webcomic, it's a great way to practice your art.

Yeah. Particularly with a Keenspace account.

Particularly if it's free and -- right. Now, you have gone through both -- when it comes to the mass availability of selfpublishing on the web, there's music, there's art, there's text. I don't think I'm really missing anything.

Not a lot. There's a certain degree of animation.

Exactly. Animation.

And movies and the like.

Yeah. So you've tried at least two of those.

Yes.

Which do you think has helped you more? Do you think blogging has helped your writing more, or do you think the drawing of Gossamer Commons and Unfettered by Talent has improved your art more?

Almost certainly the blog has improved my writing more. I think unfettered by Talent improved my art inasmuch as it's comprehensible. Now it's not simply a complete mess. But it didn't end up making my artistic talent sufficient so that I'd ever consider myself able to support myself through my drawings. I don't think that's ever going to be on the table.

Maybe your talent -- there's a natural feeling in different places for different people.

Of course. And, in that direction, it's made me a better cartoonist, in that it taught me that where my strength was, was in scripting a cartoon, instead of in drawing one, which is where the collaboration with Greg has been very fruitful, and I think I'm learning an incredible amount from that. At the same time, actually trying to get something on the web every day and trying to make it not suck, which is not the easiest thing in the world to do --

Uh, yeah. I hear you, man. You're my brother in pain, here.

Absolutely. Exactly. And knowing that on occasion, you do, in fact, fail. And plenty of what I've written on Websnark or anywhere else does in fact suck. And I recognize that. But every so often, you also get that real home run, and that's wonderful. And, I mean, it also improves a sense of discipline. I mean, when you're doing something like Websnark, and you're really working hard to get something out there every day, you know, and something of value hopefully every week, it builds in you that habit.

Yeah, yeah. And no matter what it is you're doing, what medium you're practicing in, as long as it is that regular thing that you don't allow yourself to feel okay about missing.

Exactly.

Right.

I mean, leading up to, right now -- there's only been two days when I didn't post something. Sometimes it's been four lines, saying I have nothing to say today. But -- and that was a little bit psychotic, to be perfectly honest. There should have been days when I just felt it was okay to not show up. And I'm getting a little better, as far as that goes. But hand in hand with that, I still have this overriding sense -- I mean, it's almost a fear. You know, the fear that if -- you know I don't show up for three days, when I show up on day four, there's only going to be half the people there who were there before that. I like having people show up. I mean, there is, without a doubt, an ego boost involved with having an audience. I think every writer on earth knows that.

Which is one of the reasons why the premise of Gossamer Commons surrounds a writer who wants to be significant. I mean, to the point where, offered anything he wants in the world, what he wants is intangible. What he wants is to be significant in the literary world. I think that's a common thought for writers. I think writers want to have an audience in the present, and a sense of -- that they're going to have some impact on history in the future.

We've talked about the fact that webcomics are one among many media and one among many various methods of expression and entertainment. What is it that you think webcomics, by the nature of the medium, are best at? Or if not by the nature of the medium, then by the evidence that you've experienced, in trying them out amongst a lot of other media?

I actually think they are ideal art forms for the world wide web. I'm a little sad for that, because obviously I'm a huge proponent of text. At the end of the day, I consider myself a writer. I'm trying all kinds of different experiments in writing, and trying to get different things happening in writing. But a webcomic nails the strengths of the web. Particularly if we're not talking about things like flash animation or even animated GIFs. If we're just talking straight JPEGs on the web, you go to the site, the image resolves, it's there, and it's simple to download, it's simple to interpret, it's optimized for one page. Nothing, no art form, I think, that's been on the web, has really played to the web's strength as much as that has. And that, I think -- that's something that can be built on. Now, five years from now, we're going to be doing something entirely different, I'm sure. And when -- 

Would you like some?

No, thank you. When we're doing something different, something else will be the dominant art form then. But for right now --

I've never had an jalapeno popper before. It looked like the only vegetarian thing.

Good luck!

I believe they were mentioned in Office Space.

I think they were, now that you mention it. It might be just the tiniest bit hot, to warn you now.

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm feeling that with my fingers. That's why I'm dipping it in the salsa.

Sumana, I hope I answered your question.

No, no, no, certainly. Webcomics have been around for five to ten years, basically.

But they're all the way back to -- yeah. They go all the way back to 1993, depending on your definition of them.

What do you miss about the early days?

Oh, man. Absolutely the anarchy of it. This actually goes back to --

There's sour cream in here!

Okay.

I'm sorry. The anarchy of it.

No problem. Is it good?

I think so. I think so. Go on, go on.

I've been doing the internet thing since about 1985, which is really frightening. But I remember the days before the web. I remember the days --

Gopher and --

Right. I remember the days of Usenet and listservs, and the server kicking around the University of Maine, which was called UMNEWS. And there was a real feeling that, in those days, you were making your own fun. There was no possibility of making revenue on it. In fact, the web was -- I'm saying the web -- the net was antithetical to the idea that someone would make money off of it. That somehow this was an encroachment. Audiences were tiny, but at the same time, literally, almost anything could go.

I'm trying to figure out whether that's supposed to be Yorick from Y the Last Man.

I don't know. It very well might be.

Are you Yorick? I'm going to say yes.

That or Sandman. I mean, that could be a Sandman.

There is that, yeah. Also the gas maskslashGanesha look?

Yeah.

I'm sorry. So it was so noncommercial, it was anticommercial.

Right. And it was utterly free, in so many ways.

Free as in beer and free as in speech.

Yes.

Right.

One of the things -- although, at the same time, there was this extraordinary small population that even had access to it. Actually, there was a phenomenon that came up around 1990 to 1991, of people who would graduate from college, find people who weren't using their university accounts, and would continue using them. Because once they left school, there was just no staying on there. I mean, you could buy a portal account, but they were mindnumbingly expensive. They were something like $4.99 a minute.

CompuServe and Prodigy eventually came along in the '90s, but --

Right, but even those, for the longest time, didn't have any direct internet connection. They were discrete services. They were bulletin boards.

Yeah, yeah.

So, on the one hand, if you actually got into it, almost anything went. I make a lot of references on Websnark to an old listserv that, before that was on UMNEWS, a shareduniverse fiction writing thing called Superguy, which, I understand, at its height, had maybe a hundred people reading it, and vast amounts of were terrible, but at the same time, there was a real excitement in writing it, because anything went. We felt like we were -- we felt like we were creating worlds as interesting and as expansive as anything that DC or Marvel were doing. I've actually compared it to webcomics, in a lot of ways. A sense that we were doing webcomics before graphics could be part of it. Because it was very much the same kind of thing. People were doing regular -- you know, three a week or five a week --

Weblogging fiction that's very short and very sort of cinematic and visual.

Exactly.

That crosses the boundaries. Like Anacrusis.

Exactly. I mean, Anacrusis, I think -- and Anacrusis, I think, is an incredibly cool -- both a cool website and a cool potential art form. There's also what they call drabbles floating out there now. I vastly prefer the term anacrusis. But both of them, this idea -- you almost have a poetic sense of them, because you have some of the limitations of poetry, but put into prose. So the idea that you've got to build a certain amount -- and we were working under that sort of limitation too. I mean, back in the Superguy days, you pretty much had 200 lines of email text to work with. Any more than that, you had trouble. And so you had to either break things up into multiple parts or just learn economy of phrase. And anyone who's read Websnark for the last few months knows that if there's anything I need a refresher on, it's economy of phrase.

I would say -- I wasn't going to bring it up -- but the truth is, I was going to bring it up, as soon as I turn off the tape recorder. 

Well, it certainly can be on the record. I've had it charitably described that I sometimes need 1500 words to describe what I had for breakfast that morning, and it's unfortunately true.

I was probably going to say something about delivering a truckload of Strunk and White to your door.

Yes. Which would not be a bad idea, to be perfectly honest. Although I have a certain reverence for Strunk and White. My father is actually an English professor, and he preached Strunk and White. And it's something that -- again, it's an evolutionary process.

[End Part 1 at 34:29]

[Until 18:48 overlaps with part 1]

...Again, it's an evolutionary process. If you look at the very early days of Websnark, I actually have a lot more economy of phrase than I do now.

Yeah. Which is when I started reading.

I remember that, actually.

The Snarkoleptic bowling shirts  are they ever going to happen?

They are going to happen.

(inaudible) 

They are going to happen. The people I was going to produce them with turned out not to -- I didn't like the quality of what was going to be coming out of it. So I elected not to produce it with them, and it's been one of those things on the back burner. Sooner or later I'm going to find someone who will do it. And at that point, I'll put out another open call, and anyone who's interested -- to be perfectly honest, we'll probably get a few more people who are interested now than were back in September. Which is the weirdest part of this entire process.

I know what you mean. But to get back to webcomics being really good at sort of both being challenging in a good way by the limitation of the web, but also making the best out of the opportunities of the web --

Right. And actually, it goes both ways there too. One of the areas I get in trouble with cartoonists about is my rather dogmatic views on the infinite canvas. So inasmuch as -- it's not that I'm against the infinite canvas, but I think that a good number of the uses of the infinite canvas -- and, for that matter, flash interfaces and other experimental techniques -- end up not serving the comic in the least.

Right, yeah. It's just frippery. It's masturbation. Right.

Exactly right. And it becomes a situation where, if you have something that would work better as just being four panel comics, and you put it all into one long thing, that it takes 20 minutes to download off of a broadband connection --

And I have to do silly things to my mouse to get it to even -- 

Exactly. And side scrolling and all of this stuff -- it becomes more of a pain in the neck than it becomes an effective art form.

I should not need handeye coordination to read your frikking comic.

Exactly. There have been times it has been done extraordinarily well. And that's not what I'm talking about.

Of course. Really good people can break rules. Can use interesting tools and --

Or people who are actually doing experimentation, for that matter. I mean, somebody who comes up with a new way of doing things and really pushes a limit does amazingly cool stuff. And that's all for the good. I don't think anybody can deny that. It's the 25 people who come after and do exactly the same thing without the degree of thought put into it.

Right. Like comics, and probably will be Anacrusis copycats.

Knockoffs. Right. Without the level of depth that's brought to Anacrusis on a daily basis. I mean, Anacrusis is really an unfolding story. Rebecca Borgstrom's site, Hitherby Dragons, is another example. It is glorious and epic and beautiful, and it has inspired a lot of people who are coming out and aping the form of Hitherby Dragons, without necessarily aping the depth of it. Does that mean that --

So often the people who are first are the best, but sometimes it sort of takes a little while for someone to come along and be like -- okay, this is a great thing you can do with this.

Well, there are two ways that it can happen. First off, the person who actually breaks the ground is always going to be the innovator. Someone else can come along, pick up that tool, and do something amazing with it. Scott McCloud, I don't think, has produced the best infinite canvas comics out there. I think they've been good.

You like Queen of Wands.

I do like Queen of Wands. I think Queen of Wands -- Queen of Wands, I think, takes some of the concepts of the infinite canvas, even though it's not particularly infinite.

Well, not infinite.

But you don't have to scroll through three screens to read most Queen of Wands. At the same type, it's taken the form of it, with its lightning path structure. And it's really using it for good reasons. That kind of thing excites me. And I love seeing it. And I love seeing people who come up with new wrinkles and new ways of doing things. So the fellow -- and I don't remember his name, unfortunately -- but the fellow who does the Flash comic Apocamon --

Oh, Patrick Farley, of eSheep.com.

Thank you. Yes. Patrick Farley has done some infinite canvas comics on eSheep that are astoundingly good, and really take a panorama of color and -- and he's a side scroller. These are the things I hate most, according to theory, and they absolutely blew me away. And I thought they were the best -- some of the best comics I'd ever seen. It's proof positive that these things can be done really, really well. It's when somebody takes the tool and just throws it out there so they can say they've done it, or because they want to be part of a trend -- that's where you run into problems. On the other side of it, it could probably be argued that somebody who throws up a four panel comic with really crappy artwork is just aping a trend too, but, you know, that directly impacts on me, so I won't say that.

Are there particular tools where you feel like you're waiting for someone to come along and do something great, because no one's done it yet?

There are, actually.

What are they?

For all that I talk negatively about Flash, I don't think we've seen the first really good Flash comic yet. Apocamon has probably come as close as anything, but for the most part, you know, it ends up being really cut rate animation or really cut rate -- or taking HTML navigation tools and making them Flash navigation tools, and there's no real reason to do either.

Have you seen Tipuana? Or is that QuickTime?

Tipuana, I think, is QuickTime. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and I'll issue an apology, because it is certainly very good stuff. If I'm thinking of the same thing you're thinking of.

Irena (inaudible) 

Yeah. There will come somebody who does something with Flash that is so mindnumbingly cool that we can't imagine why it is we didn't think of it first.

Can you predict where you think that person's going to come from? What community or what kind of --

I think it's going to be a 17yearold, who -- it'll be the first weekend he actually sees Flash. I honestly think that so many of the innovations we see -- I mean, there are always exceptions to this. But so many of the innovations we've seen have come out of people discovering the tools without knowing the rules behind them, so that they make stuff that doesn't follow those rules.

Flash. What else? What other tools?

Flash is a big one. It really is. Because in webcomics, it all comes down to sequential art. And it's hard to conceive of what technology can be applied to sequential art that's going to blow us out of the water. Something will come along. But what that is -- five or six years ago, the answer would have been multimedia, only what that truly was, was TextWrap. 

I think Myst was kind of sequential art.

Certainly Myst was as close as you get to living inside of a comic book, in terms of following a very linear sort of story, interacting with the environment, and moving to the next level. I definitely can see a correspondence there, but at the same time -- and actually, that might be the thing that we're waiting for. The question might be a question of interactivity, a question of immersion.

And interactive fiction (inaudible), but it was, A, a game, and B -- yeah, it was -- it took the direction of being a commercial game that you play once, and try and get to the end, and there's not as much of -- there's sort of two branches now. There's the Myst -- look around and see how beautiful it is and the very goal oriented stuff.

Right. But -- well, stop and think for a moment. If we're talking about comics, which inevitably puts us in mind of superheroes even though superheroes really don't have that big a penetration in webcomics --

Your City of Heroes, your --

Take something like City of Heroes as an example. And I say that largely because I play it. But -- and I don't think City of Heroes is an example of what I'm about to talk about, in terms of interactive story telling, but it shows the potential directions we're going. There is a possible convergence between being (inaudible) and put into City of Heroes, designing costumes, designing characters, along with somebody setting up the right type of mission and setting up the right type of dynamic. There's no particular reason that on top of that you can't have an engine that is tracking what's going on, that's supporting it -- in fact, City of Heroes has --

Right, yeah.

That then, when you're finished, can be downloaded by the overall -- someone who can then edit it, piece it together, choose different camera angles and the like, and literally create a comic.

Yeah.

Yeah. That becomes a situation -- I mean, it almost becomes like Dream Park by Larry Niven, where -- Dream Park was essentially live action role playing. It's what we would see as live action role playing now. A bunch of people running around inside, admittedly, a holographic environment, where anything could happen around them, and they could see all of it. But part of the ancillary rights to the Dream Park they were buying was that they then made a movie out of it and they sold it. And this is where they made their money off it. So you would have the gamers who would play it, and then it would become an art form after that. And I think we're moving into a situation where that kind of thing can happen, and somebody who manages to use the technology appropriately that way, who can then turn around and throw it up on a website -- I mean, we've seen the beginnings of that with stuff like Red Versus Blue.

Yeah. The trick of that is, I think, to make sure that it's regular. I'm not going to say it's easy, but it is much easier to write one good thing, to create, say, a movie every quarter or a really good comic every month, than it is to do it every day or every week.

Exactly.

RSS feeds make it a little easier to get people addicted to you, but not much yet.

Yeah. And that's definitely a factor in all of that. I mean, speaking of Red Versus Blue, I mean, the thing that everyone loves about Red Versus Blue is the fact that it's so well put together. And that sort of thing takes time. It takes time to set things up. You have to actually have actors, quoteunquote, running around in the environment, and then hand in hand with that, then they have to put in all the voice work, the post production work, the editing work. In a lot of ways, it's as complicated as doing any other movie project. Just without $70 million and an ILM contract.

And instead of Variety, it's you.

Yeah.

Okay. So we had Flash. Are there any other tools that you're really looking forward to seeing people use in a great way?

There are, but I couldn't tell you what they are.

If you remember, let me know.

What I mean by that is -- I think, to a certain degree, we're not going to know what they are until somebody comes out and shows that they've done it.

Like, if I told you I'm going to use Ajax and Google Maps to do something amazing, you know --

Right. And that's certainly within the realm of possibility. Taking an example of that, what Elan Lee and Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman did with the AI game, The Beast, as it's called, was an implementation in the use of the world wide web that nobody had seen before that. I mean, they literally created an interactive world of websites that interrelated to one another and trusted that if they got enough views of the television advertiser, people would Google them, find them, and end up being buried in an interactive mystery novel. That kind of thing takes the technology we see every day and absolutely blows it out of the water. And we've seen a ton of interactive fiction games and puzzles and story telling come out of that. Years later, I think there are four of them (inaudible), for example.

Okay. So I guess I kind of have a sense of the things that I wanted to ask. I could imagine asking you later -- get your email or something --

Of course. Sure.

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